Tag Archives: Fiona Fitzsimons

Rob Goodbody

What Industrial Heritage

On Heritage Week, renowned historical geographer, Rob Goodbody, discussed Ireland’s industrial heritage. It’s a truism that Ireland never had much industry to speak of, so does Ireland have an industrial heritage? Rob Goodbody takes us beyond manufacturing industry, and looks at the infrastructure set in place for a much larger Irish population in the past. He looks at the evidence in the Irish landscape of mining and quarrying, which challenges the idea that Ireland lacks natural resources. The evidence of our industrial past is visible in the landscape. Listen in to find out more.

Ray Gillespie

The house on Bunion Hill: an Irish census project

How do you write local history? In the past people worked within a world of family and community. For that reason, genealogy is a very important resource for the local historian but is often forgotten about, as local historians tend to concentrate on place rather than people.

The Prof. looked at one household in north Armagh in the 1901 census to see what the history of one family might tell us about the world in which they lived.

He concluded that genealogists need to become more historically minded, and historians need to pay more attention to genealogy.

A genealogy expert has shown UTV Ireland evidence from land records which prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that George Clooney’s ancestors lived on land in Knockeen in Windgap, Co. Kilkenny.

Known as the “Clooney homestead”, George Clooney’s ancestral house and land has since been passed down through the Burke family.

Noreen Burke Hayes, the great granddaughter of Richard Burke, said that her father always talked about how the Clooney’s lived in her house.

“He was a great historian in his time. He always mentioned the fact that the Clooney’s lived in the house and that a Burke man married in,” she explained.

Fiona Fitzsimons from genealogy service Eneclann, has been scrutinising documents to verify the Burke families claims.

“Nicholas Clooney, born in 1829 in Windgap Co Kilkenny is George Clooney’s great, great, grandfather, so he is his direct ancestor.

“We know that the Clooney’s settled in Kentucky, and they remained in Kentucky for the next four generations,” she said.

In August of 1852, Nicholas Clooney and six other farmers known as cottiers, were jailed for illegally working on the Sabbath.

It was an old law, which the authorities usually chose to turn a blind eye to.

“Nicholas Clooney was convicted and he was fined four shillings and two pence. Now, I sat down and did that math and that actually works out as the equivalent of eight days wages for a labouring man.

“So it was a sizeable sum for somebody who was already feeling the pinch. It was a sum that he was unable to pay and he served four days hard labour in lieu of the fine which he couldn’t beat,” explained Fiona.

Following his release from prison, Nicholas Clooney and his siblings emigrated to the United States in search of a better life, leaving behind only his widowed mother Mary Clooney who became the link to the Burke family who now live on the Clooney homestead.

“Mary Walsh, who was a niece of the Clooney’s, came to live here in Knockeen with her widowed aunt Mary Clooney. While she was here she married Richard Burke, a boy who lived next door, and they continued to live here and had eight children,” said Noreen.

It is not known yet if George Clooney himself will visit Kilkenny in the coming months, but an invitation has been extended to the Hollywood A-lister and his wife Amal.

Our guest speaker for continuous professional development in June will be Dr Liz Rushen.

Liz’s talk is entitled:

“The migration of Irish women to colonial Australia”

Thousands of Irish girls migrated to Australia in the 1830s, a decade before the Great Famine. What was it like to migrate to the far ends of the known world at this time? How did they survive the rigours of the voyage? Did they ‘swing swang’ in hammocks or have to fight for every morsel to eat? What sort of reception did they receive? Come and hear Dr Liz Rushen talk about these adventurous Irish women and their migration experience.

Date: Wednesday 17th June.

Time: 3.pm-4.30pm.

Location: National Library of Ireland.

Dr. Liz Rushen is a Research Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and is the former Executive Director of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. She is the author of fifteen books, three of them co-authored with Perry McIntyre;Quarantined (2007),The Merchant’s Women (2008) and Fair Game: Australia’s first Immigrant Women (2010).

The fun of the genealogy service in the National Library is that we never know in advance who we’ll meet, or what stories we’ll hear. Our job is to listen, to identify verifiable facts and events, and to guide enquirers in their research. The search never ends, because family history isn’t just about the past, it allows people to construct their own personal identity. Here are some of the stories we’ve heard from recent visitors to the Library’s Genealogy Room.

If you’ve spent any time with the U.S. Census records, you’ll know that your immigrant ancestors didn’t usually travel solo. ‘Chain migration’ facilitated European immigrants to hold onto their cultural identity. The American Civil War transformed the experience of many Irish immigrants. Irish involvement on both sides of the American Civil War was one of the defining moments in the creation of an Irish-American identity.

We recently met Mr. Walter Manser, of Mobile, Alabama in the Library. Walter’s great grandfather arrived in the 1860s in America, following in the footsteps of an older brother. Although the two brothers arrived within ten years of one another, they experienced very different opportunities. Walter Manser’s family-history captures the rapid pace of change in America during the Civil War, and immediately after.

In the 1850s Irish-born James Manser settled in Mobile, Alabama. Through hard work and a certain amount of luck, he gradually established a thriving grocery business in the city. In 1861 the Civil War broke out and after 1862 James was drafted into the Confederate Army.

In 1863 the younger Manser brother, Robert Manser, stepped off a boat in the port of New York and was offered $500 to take the place of an American drafted into the Union Army. $500 was a healthy stake to invest in his future: all he had to do was to survive. He took the money, and fought in the Union Army until 1865, when the War ended. His pension records are/were in the name of ‘Robert Manser, otherwise Robert Collins’ – the man for whom he substituted during the War.

Once peace broke out, Robert Manser travelled south to Alabama to join his brother. James welcomed him, but explained to Robert the greater problem they now faced. As a former serving Union soldier, Robert was not welcome in the South. The brothers put their heads together and devised a solution. Robert left Mobile, returning within three years, to all intents and purposes just off the boat from Ireland.

The Manser brothers found a way to save face; they kept their reputation and the respect of the community they settled in, while proving that blood is thicker than water.

* * * * * * * * *

Sometimes the enquiries we get in the Library are about whether it’s possible to reach back across oceans and through time, to trace early origins in Ireland. As a rule of thumb, the earlier the date when an ancestor left Ireland, the more difficult it can be to document. Diana and Colin Hansen inherited a small family archive of newspaper cuttings, letters and documents that dated back to an Irish ancestor in the first generation of colonial settlement in Australia.

William Craig was born about 1772 in Ireland, place unknown, and died in Australia in 1828. He was convicted of an unknown felony and transported to Australia, arriving in 1821 aboard the convict ship S.S Prince Regent. William’s son Richard Craig (1812-1855), arrived at the same time or shortly after with his mother.

The Hansens believe they were brought over on the same sailing of the Prince Regent, which if it proves true, would have been very unusual. On his release, William Craig set himself up as a butcher in Windsor Sydney. In 1828 William and his son Richard were convicted of rustling cattle. William was sent to Norfolk Island and died there. Richard Craig, the son was sent to ‘work in chains’ in Morton Bay. He escaped and was taken in by Aborigines. Richard learned the skills of a bushman and familiarised himself with the territory. Using his knowledge of the terrain, he explored the ‘Big River’ (now the Clarence), identified the rich pasture land along the river, and opened up a cross-country route – known as Craig’s Line – in the area now known as Grafton. Richard received a free pardon, settled in the district of the Clarence Valley, and raised a large family.

The total sum of the Hansen’s information was from Australia. When we met them in the Library they wanted to find out about the life that the Craig family left behind in Ireland. Specifically, where they were from, the crime that led to a sentence of Transportation, and why the convicted man’s wife and son were brought out to Australia at the same time.

Transportation Registers from Ireland 1790 to 1835 were destroyed in 1922. However, record-keeping in Australia is unusually good, and there are very many online sources and data-bases. The first step was to consult an online resource – Peter Mayberry’s Irish Convicts to New South Wales 1788-1849http://members.pcug.org.au/~ppmay/cgi-bin/irish/irish.cgi

This confirmed what we already knew about William Craig (his age, the boat and year he arrived in Australia), but it also gave further leads: William’s native place was given as Strokestown, county Roscommon; his calling was ‘butcher’ and ‘farmer’; he was tried in Cavan and sentenced to 7 years Transportation.

Using this evidence, we guided the Hansens to search the Irish newspaper collection, focusing on coverage of trials before the Cavan Assizes 1820 and 1821 – up to 12 months before William Craig arrived in Australia. http://search.findmypast.ie/search/irish-newspapers

The Freeman’s Journal informed us that in the 1820 Spring Assizes held in Cavan, William Craig was convicted of sheep-stealing, and sentenced to 7 years Transportation.

So in a short time, we were able to guide the Hansen’s research so as to provide answers to some of the long-standing questions that remained about their ancestors’ Irish origins. A concrete research result also meant that Colin and Diana immediately revised their travel plans, to include a visit to Cavan and Roscommon.

Dr Bruce Durie has enjoyed two successful careers in different fields. He began his professional life as a biochemist/ pharmacologist. In 1977 he was awarded the IBRO/ UNESCO Fellowship as ‘Scotland’s most promising young neuroscientist.”

In the 90s, he moved into family history, and later completed a doctorate in History and Education. He set up and ran (until 2011) the post-graduate programme in Genealogical Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Now an Honorary Fellow of Strathclyde, where he is developing a full-time Masters degree in Genealogical Studies, he also teaches Genealogy, Documents and Heraldry courses for the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scottish Studies Scholar Award, for 2016.

FF: Bruce, before we start, I did a little reading in preparation for this interview. I never knew that you were a neuro-scientist.

BD: Oh, that was a long time ago, when I had a brain.

FF: I had to smile, because it made me think of the old joke, you don’t have to be a brain-surgeon…

BD:(laughs) … but it helps! Yes, I won a prize as “Scotland’s most promising neuro-scientist”, and I spent three years in psychiatry, this side of the table! Where did it all go wrong, eh? (laughter).

Actually there’s an interesting point in there. I don’t have any evidence for this (laughs), but a number of us have speculated that biologists are disproportionately represented in Professional genealogy, it’s a desire to taxonomise,[1] and genealogists are comfortable with ambiguity, qualities that you don’t find in mathematicians, physicists, engineers and so on.

FF:So, how long have you been a genealogist, and when did you get started in genealogy?

BD: 20-odd years professionally, almost my whole life as an amateur.

FF:Tell me about the early years?

BD: I started when I was five years old. Do you remember, when we were kids, somebody would always give our parents a baby book for every child. It had an envelope where you could put the child’s first tooth, a lock of hair, and all of that. Inside the front cover of mine was a tree and no one had filled it in. So I went round pestering everybody in the family for dates, and places and names. Interestingly, one part of the family thought this was hilarious, but the other side went “ohhh, you don’t want to be looking into that son, you never know what you might find.” Exactly the two responses that we find to genealogy out in the wide-world, today.

What I discovered was, that nobody knew much, beyond my grandparents talking about their parents, and maybe their grandparents. There wasn’t very great detail – they just didn’t know names, dates and places . They said “We come from Devon”, or “We’ve always been in Fife” – that kind of thing, and some of it was conjectural. The best part of it though, was that my maternal grandfather, who didn’t want to talk much about his family, began to tell me stories that his grandfather had told him about the Crimean War [1853-56]. If you think about it, grandparents who were born about 1900 were brought up by parents who were Victorians and would have had Victorian values, and if you’re a Scottish Presbyterian, quite a lot of those come down to you anyway (laughs).

FF:You say ‘twenty-odd years’ as a professional genealogist: how odd have those years been?

BD: Well, being a professional genealogist is always odd, it’s continuously odd. You need to be able to deal with constant change. Do you remember back in the days when there was no training, and no real way of genealogists getting together? [Professional genealogists] used to pick up clients almost by chance.

I was fortunate, in that I was spending a lot of time in America, which I still do, and almost everyone said the same thing which was “we’re descended from Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, William Wallace, etcetera. And I used to say “would you like me to find out how accurate that is for you.” So for the first ten years of my professional career, all my clients were overseas.

FF: And did you ever find anyone who was descended from one of the Bruces or William Wallace?

BD: (laughs) Everybody is descended from William Wallace, Mary Queen of Scots, or Robert the Bruce by some line or other. But there’s nobody called Stuart descended from Mary Queen of Scots, there’s nobody by the name of Bruce descended from Robert the Bruce, because those died out in the maleline. So to those who say, I can get my genealogy back to Charlemagne, I always say, “sure you can, but can you document it?”

FF: One of the projects that you’re most closely associated with, is the Masters in Genealogy in Strathclyde University.

BD:I suppose people first started to notice me about ten years ago when I started the first post-graduate professional Masters level course, in the University of Strathclyde.

FF:Why and how did you decide to set it up as a post-graduate-level course?

BD: Well let me answer the how of your question first.

I went looking for a training scheme or a qualification and I couldn’t find any. I was doing something else in Strathclyde at the time, and the Project came to an end. I was talking to one of the senior people in Strathclyde who said “what are we going to do with you then?” And I said, “well do you know there is no University teaching proper genealogy in the whole world”. And he said “gosh I was watching that on the telly last night. Looks fascinating. Off you go then.” So if he’d been watching the football, none of this would have happened. (laughter).

We started with £5,000 and six months to get it right. We were always going to have a Masters course, but we staged it. We put up a post-grad certificate, and the next year a post-graduate diploma, and two years after that a Masters. Originally they were actual physical classes in a classroom, but we developed online classes alongside. And eventually after four years we did away with the physical classes, and it was all done online. It immediately proved a massive success.

As for the reason we set it up as a Master’s course? Well, no undergraduate department would touch it. No one else could see the point, until I was introduced to a fabulous person in the Centre for Life Long Learning, and she said “this is excellent, let’s do it and embarrass them all.” (Laughter) It’s much easier to get a post-graduate course on the books than an undergraduate one. The other question people ask me is why is it an M.Sc. and not an M.A., and of course in Scotland and I think in Trinity [College Dublin] as well, an M.A. is an undergraduate degree.

FF: Exactly. Everyone has the right to apply for their M.A. within twelve months of graduating.

BD: Don’t you have to eat three dinners at high table or something?

FF:That’s no great hardship, especially when there’s good wine at the table. (laughter).

FF:So, tell me, what do you enjoy most about being a professional genealogist?

BD:The ability to dig into a whole range of primary source documents that most people don’t know exist. One of the things that disturbs me about watching undergraduate history students being taught, is that they hardly ever get to primary sources. Genealogists deal with nothing but primary sources, all the time. It’s an incredible buzz, especially if you’re digging into un-indexed records which nobody’s looked at for hundreds of years, until you blow the dust off.

There’s so much stuff locked up in archival boxes in various places that nobody ever gets to. The real killer for me was getting all the Retours – that’s the missing piece of the puzzle in Scottish genealogy, tracing where did all the land go.

FF:Can you explain what a Retour is.

BD:Sure. Up until 1868 in Scotland, a will or testament could only deal with moveable estate: cash, crops, furniture, knives and forks, pictures and so on. Immoveable estate was handled by a completely different process, formally called the Retours of Services of Heirs. They’re not available anywhere, easily, and yet there are entire genealogies locked up in there, that don’t appear in birth/ marriage/ death records. And they go from 1544 up to 1860s, when the system was changed.

[Bruce prepared the Retours Abbreviations for publication in three volumes] *They’re like telephone directories, each one over 800 pages in tiny print. You could stun a burglar with them, they’re huge. [laughter]

* www.brucedurie.co.uk/books

FF:So is that your area of specialization?

BD: Other people would say Teaching, writing, broadcasting, because that’s where they would tend to bump into me. What I like most is palaeography, getting into the old curly writing, and making sense of it. I must have a freak brain, because I find it very easy to read almost anything. (laughs).

But also I’m a major fan of Heraldry, often discounted as the ‘floral border’ around genealogy. But again, there are entire pedigrees bound up in coats of arms.

And because I’m specialised in that I advise people getting coats of arms legally registered in Scotland, re-matriculating old coats of arms, getting clans and families to find the right chief, and all those things.

FF:Indeed. Did you see the story this week, of what is supposedly a portrait of Shakespeare, his identity supposedly revealed in the little heraldic device underneath?

BD: First off, although Shakespeare did get arms for his father in 1596, it’s a far cry from what’s in the picture. I’ve seen the picture and to me it looks like a classical man holding a plant! It could be anybody. I think someone has found a good way to get a bit of publicity out of this.

FF:Can you give us a genealogy tip or method that you always recommend to people?

BD: Yes, and this is not only for overseas people, but in Scotland too. You cannot do Scottish genealogy from Ancestry, or Family Search or any of the commercial sites. Can’t do it. The reason is, the records are only available on [the website] Scotland’s People and related sites. Scotland won’t hand them over, we make too much money out of it, which is quite right! It drives the commercial providers absolutely crazy.

But hardly anybody knows these great sites exist, or how to use them. So it’s a mission of mine to go out there and say: it’s all here, you can get it, and it’s not difficult.

FF:Tell us about your role as Track leader for Scotland, in the British Institute?

BD: I want to show people there’s so much more to documents than just a name and a date. People often take just take the bare bones of a document, but in fact there’s a great more in there. Censuses are one of my particular interests, because there’s so much social and economic information buried in a census. There’s a column recording the number of rooms with windows in a house, and of course that’s a wonderful thing, because it tells you so much about living conditions. One of the exercises I do, is to take people from an 1861 Census, through all the [published] censuses, and up to the present day with a Google Maps aerial shot, and there’s the house, and you can see exactly the number of rooms it has.

Then helping people navigate in the LDS Library, and showing them a few “secret places.”

FF:What can people expect to take away with them, if they attend your course?

BD: It’s going to focus on how to find people, how to find places, and how to find inheritance records – and that’s a particularly interesting one.

FF: Do you have any good stories from inheritance records?

BD:Yes, quite a lot of the work that comes in to me, starts with a story that the house and land should have come down to my side of the family, but it went to the other lot, can we get it back? I always, always say to them from the beginning, there’s nothing and never was, just trust me on that one, but I’m happy to spend your money, finding out, and proving it to you. (laughs)

The best story I know was similar to the caseof Jarndyce vs Jarndyce , where the side of the family that *did*inherit the money, spent most of it fending off legal battles from the other side, so that by the time they got to the end of it, and it was clear that [title] was right, there was nothing left. And the only real property had been vested in one of the daughters, who was to stay in it as a life-renter until she married or died. She decided not to do the first, and didn’t do the second for a very long time. She outlived even some of her grand nieces and nephews, so at the end of it, there was absolutely nothing.

FF:Are there any peculiarities about land law in Scotland?

BD: Yes, Scotland was a feudal country until 2004, nobody owned land, it was all owned by the crown, and then there was a chain of heritable possession beneath that. So until recently, it was possible to trace land possession through this chain because every time land was sold or passed on after a death, there’s a piece of paper that tells us this, and this is where the Retours come from, and incredibly recondite system that generates a piece of paper every time the land changes hands, for 300 years. It made searching an absolute joy, because all changes had to be registered.

Our first guest speaker will be Catriona Crowe of the National Archives.

Catriona Crowe is Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. She is Manager of the Irish Census Online Project, which has placed the 1901 and 1911 censuses online free of charge over the last years. She is an Editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, which published its eighth volume, covering the period 1945-48, in November 2012. She is editor of Dublin 1911, published by the Royal Irish Academy in late 2011.

She is Honorary President of the Irish Labour History Society, and a former President of the Women’s History Association. She is Chairperson of the Irish Theatre Institute, which promotes and supports Irish theatre and has created an award-winning website of Irish theatre productions. She is Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Limerick. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Catriona will be giving a talk on:

Online genealogical resources: what the National Archives has in store in 2015.

Mary Cahill is a professional Trainer, designing and delivering information technology courses to private and public sector clients for over 15 years. She caters for all levels from basic to advanced users of application software.

Mary has had an interest in genealogy for many years and completed the certificate course in Family History at UCD in 2012. She has continued to enhance her knowledge by conducting research on behalf of private clients.

Throughout her studies and research Mary was surprised by the extent of IT knowledge required by a professional genealogist and has frequently been called upon to assist her fellow genealogists in developing their skills.

Mary will be giving a talk on:

“Learn to love your computer again: how to get better results from the digital tools at your command.”

Welcome back and happy 2015. In the latest Eneclann newsletter we let you in on some exciting new events coming up this year for Eneclann. We have the latest edition of Irish Lives Remembered featuring part 2 of the story of Princess Charlene of Monaco’s Irish roots, and an intriguing royal link to QE2! We bring you the real truth behind George Clooney’s Irish Roots, and our readers’ “favourite bit” – the Research tip of the week. We have the first news of events in 2015, where you can meet the Eneclann experts at home and abroad; And, if you still want more, we have an article on “Workhouses and Direct Provision”, published in The Journal. Enjoy

The Truth about George Clooneys Irish Roots

Eneclann feature’s in today’s,Sunday Independent with an article on Hollywood star George Clooney and his Irish Roots, The article gathers information from research discovered by Eneclann’s very own Expert researcher Fiona Fitzsimons, You can also read the full story on his Kilkenny homestead in,Irish Lives Remembered, Read all you,need to know here.

Fiona’s trip to Saltlake City

Earlier this month Fiona visited Salt Lake City, Utah for work. She was there to attend a board meeting of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), and stayed on for the APG’s annual Professional Management Conference. Read how Fiona got on here.

Teaching Irish Family History in Salt Lake City

The British Institute has invited Eneclann’s own Fiona Fitzsimons to teach the Irish Track in its’ prestigious course, next September in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the recent edition of British Connections magazine, Fiona wrote about what she hoped to impart to all those signing up to her course. “My main goal will be to help my students to “navigate” the tumult of Irish history” Read the full article .

Irish Lives Remembered

The January/February edition of ,Irish Lives Remembered Genealogy e-Magazine is now out, There’s some fabulous feature articles in this latest issue, but we’re most interested in the story of Princess Charlene of Monaco’s Irish roots. Princess Charlene has an intriguing connection to the English Queen Elizabeth II. Go to page 26 and,read this wonderful story.

RootsTech 2015

Eneclann are heading to,RootsTech 2015 conference, The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) will also hold its 2015 National Conference in conjunction with,RootsTech in Salt Lake City, Utah, February 12-14, 2015,Read all about it here.

Probate Genealogy.

Eneclann and,Heirsireland, Ireland’s two leading probate genealogy firms, have combined to provide a comprehensive genealogical service to the Irish legal profession. With over 60 years combined experience on legal, title and probate research, which includes: Completing research, Identifying rightful heirs, Preparing required documentation and more,Read about The Irish Probate Genealogy Partners services here.

Workhouses and Direct Provision.

Eneclann’s own Fiona Fitzsimons recently published an article in the online magazine The Journal, in which she compared the hated workhouse system in the 19th Century and the current system of Direct Provision in today’s Ireland. The article developed out of the Expert Workshop series held last year. Fiona drew on the research of Dr. Gerard Moran, who gave the September workshop in the National Library (2014),Read the full story here,and tell us what do you think ?

Irish Genealogy Summer School

The UCC Genealogy Summer School is back in 2015. The School will include some of the leading experts working in their field, and will include over 42 lectures, field-trips, and other optional visits,Read all about it here.

In 2005 an American genealogist discovered George Clooney’s Irish roots in Windgap, county Kilkenny. Since then, extravagant claims have been made about George’s ancestry, not least that they made carpets for the Titanic. Between 2012 and 2014 Eneclann’s own Fiona Fitzsimons & Helen Moss delved into Mr. Clooney’s Irish family history, and found a complex but compelling story.

Eneclann feature’s in today’s Sunday Independent with an article on Hollywood star George Clooney and the real story behind his Irish Roots, The article gathers information from research discovered by Eneclann’s very own Expert researcher Fiona Fitzsimons, You can read the article online here.